Phil Rice 01:00
Hello, and welcome to And Now for Something Completely Machinima, the podcast about machinima, virtual production, and all sorts of other related things. My name is Phil Rice. I'm here with my co-hosts, Damian Valentine.

Damien Valentine 01:14
Hello,

Phil Rice 01:14
and Ricky Grove.

Ricky Grove 01:16
Hey, what's up?

Phil Rice 01:18
Welcome back, Ricky. Good to see you again, and

Ricky Grove 01:21
same here.

Phil Rice 01:22
This is this week is your film pick, and you've got some other stuff that you wanted to discuss as well. So I'm going to hand over to you

Ricky Grove 01:31
briefly before I launch into the my film pick. I wanted to talk about I came back from a convention, which is why I wasn't on last month's show called Stoker Con, which is a convention organized around the horror writers of America. My wife, Lisa Morton, was honored with a lifetime achievement award, and at this festival, which lasts about four days, it was in Pittsburgh, was just fabulous. They have a film festival there on Friday night, and this is their 10th anniversary. They get entries from all over the world. Now, these are short horror films, usually anywhere between five minutes to 1520, minutes max. And I've seen every one of the festivals, and they were just great, but this year, in particular, it was very, very interesting, and I wanted to mention that the quality of those short films is not that much better than the machinima films that we pick and choose here, especially the horror ones, the one that was shot in that wonderful black and white film that was shot in G mod, we saw a few months ago, you could easily choose that and put it amongst this film festival, and they'd go crazy, but I also want to mention that there's a at this film festival there was a very unique film that that sort of pushed the boundaries of horror film, and horror does that, I think, in these, this political time, in which we're all at such troublesome and stressful moments, horror often expresses the sentiment and ideas of the period better than any other genre, but this, this film was called, and I'll just go ahead and say it. The film title was called Man Eating Pussy, and of course everybody was intrigued, and it was literally set in a very strange sort of futuristic whorehouse in which an elderly man comes to see a very specific client. This client had the front of her head is a giant vagina. It literally recreated vagina, and of course his desires to go back into the womb. So this kind of thing with tittering and laughing, because this was totally realistic, so you're looking at this vagina on the screen, a human-sized vagina, and but it wasn't people, although the initial look at it was you gasping and laughing and stuff, but the theme was treated seriously, and this elderly man, you've seen him before, he's a great actor, performed it extremely well, and you can imagine the difficulties of performing in front of somebody who's wearing a green mask, in which this thing is going to be overlaid on top of it. It was just really marvelous and sad and tragic, and once you got over the initial shock of somebody doing this, it was just remarkable. So, the reason why I bring it up is I wanted to say that horror is a genre that allows you to expand the boundaries. It's very popular, and that leads into my second point that I wanted to make, is that two horror films, small, independent. Four horror films, one in particular, Backroom, shot on by a YouTube director who created a sort of world of this thing, and we've discussed the Backrooms here, I think last year they made massive amounts of money at the box office, which tells me two things: one, horror is the genre to express the anxieties of our time; two, that young, the young audience, because I'm sure people that love the YouTube film came out to see this movie. The young audience is very important, and I know Hollywood is going to come knocking at the doors of YouTube, a lot of whom are machinima filmmakers. So, if you are a machinima filmmaker, think about the fact that horror is a great genre to be able to express our time, and that the bigwigs are looking closely at the kind of works that we do that doesn't happen often, and I want to encourage everybody to think about that, and perhaps if you want to make a film in the future, consider horror pushing the boundaries of horror. So I just wanted to mention that right off the bat. Do you guys have any quick thoughts about those?

Damien Valentine 06:18
I went to see Backrooms, and it was very interesting to see how they take the YouTube videos, you know, the found footage style, and then they take it in to make a proper film, and he kind of got the found footage element in it, but then they've got the more traditional camera angles as well to tell a story with actual characters rather than just people in hazmat suits. I thought it was really well done. It was really creepy, and it kind of didn't explain anything. There's one line of dialog in the film, which was, have you ever tried to describe a dog to someone who's never seen one and then ask them to draw it? I feel like that sums up the film, because people ask, when I came out, people working in the cinema asked me what I thought of it, because they wanted to go and see it, and I said I just quoted that and said that's the best thing I got to say about it, because it was really good, but it's hard to describe to someone who hasn't seen it, or is it familiar with the YouTube videos. There was another YouTube, I don't remember her name offhand, another film that's come out that's also doing really well, which is called Obsession, and she also got her start on YouTube, so that the two filmmakers, like you said, Ricky, that's going to get a lot of Hollywood interest, that two YouTubers have suddenly made these two hit films of very low budget films and made a fortune compared to some of the big budget stuff that's also out there right now.

Ricky Grove 07:43
Well, I'm sorry to say this, Damian, but they blew the Star Wars film out of the waters.

Damien Valentine 07:48
Yeah, I kind of expected that. They,

Ricky Grove 07:51
your heart must have been broken.

Damien Valentine 07:53
The marketing department for Star Wars made some very questionable choices, and I think they made some very questionable choices about the film itself, so I can see why it's not doing so well. Like the first, you know, you expect a Star Wars film, they're a big advertising campaign. The first trailer was last year, and it's fine as if teaser trailer. Then this year they started something off, but it was a Super Bowl trailer. There was a parody of, I think, it's a beer advert or something, but it made it seem like they're treating their big Star Wars film for, you know, nearly a decade as a joke, because that's that's what it was, and then the director of the film, a few weeks before it got released, maybe a week or two, was going on about the plans they had for Mandalorian season four, which they threw out to make this film, and what he was describing as the season four plan sounded a lot more interesting than what they made the film about, but someone at Disney said we should make a Mandalorian and Grogu film that appears to casual audiences, not to people who've watched the TV show, but the TV show is going to be the target audience, because that is very specifically The Mandalorian and Grogan.

Phil Rice 09:09
Yeah, and even down to the title, the title is something that I would think doesn't have broad appeal to people who are already familiar with the IP of the original show. It just kind of is long and strange and unusual, so yeah, yeah, obsession and backrooms are interesting. Obsession, actually, the director is Curry Barker. He's a YouTuber who is known mainly for like an online sketch comedy channel that he does, but he's been dabbling in horror, and his budget, the budget for Backrooms, I want to say was somewhere in the range of 10 million, which is very low by Hollywood standards. Curry Barker's film, The Obsession, the budget was 750,000 really, really low. Budget, and he did not have any kind of like backing ahead of time, whereas I think the director of Backrooms was was approached and a deal negotiated, and he negotiated very well in terms of he gave himself a lot of, he was able to get a lot of creative control, they really let him steer the ship, which is very unusual, but the gamble, obviously, you know, paid off. So, and then obsession, they just, they made the film first, and then, you know, they kind of self-funded, so to speak, and after that went for it, kind of just bypassing the gatekeepers of Hollywood completely, and of course it's exploded. He originally was looking at the possibility of casting Jenna Ortega as the lead in that, which she's known in Hollywood. She's from several different things, but she's specifically done horror roles before, but instead they opted to go for really a complete unknown as the female lead, and she just did a just spectacular performance. So, yeah, both of those are very interesting stories. I'm as far as Hollywood starting to salivate and come to the doors and knocking? It's, it's easy to kind of get excited by that, right? As, as, oh boy, you know, but oh boy, you know, I don't know. There's, there's reasons to be cautious there too, because

Ricky Grove 11:42
well, of course, Hollywood,

Phil Rice 11:43
yeah, their objection is yours as a filmmaker. Yeah,

Ricky Grove 11:48
I mean, if you would listen to this podcast, you know I'm not a big fan of Hollywood, of course. Yeah, of course. What I'm just saying is that they follow the money, and the money they do, YouTube. So consider your options when you're making films carefully. However, when you, if they approach you, get a

Phil Rice 12:07
lawyer. Yes, but you're right. Absolutely, be

Ricky Grove 12:10
cautious about that.

Phil Rice 12:11
Yeah, yeah, because there's, there's a definite shark element. As yeah, as Ricky, you and I have been talking about that since before this podcast existed. It's been a long topic. So, all right. Well, let's let's dive into another little piece of independent horror. This one has is not on anyone's roadmap, I bet, but no, it's one you'll be happy to have seen. So, tell us about it.

Ricky Grove 12:35
Right? I chose this film. It's called Anthem. It was created by Julian Van Hocker in 2004 he now is a very popular and successful filmmaker and cinema creator. If you go to his website, which will give a link, you'll see his bio, it's extensive. He sort of moved into the big leagues. This was an early film that he created, which was shot over a summer. In fact, let me read to you what he wrote about it. He says this film is a result of a summer job at Forex Technology. Our duty was to use their handmade real-time engine called Phoenix d to create a demo movie. He had a teammate named Coyote who helped him. It was all done in d Studio Max, but it's played in real time at 45 frames per second on GeForce Two. You could see their slow down in the video. The screen capture system was quite expensive at the time, 2004 and it was a short film. I think it's only about four minutes, and it's, it's better than a sketch, it's more like a poem. What you have is a female humanoid female being tortured. Now, given the fact that the technology in 2004 was not particularly subtle, it's fairly gross. The torture is done, it's done well. well, because except for one case, there's very little blood. Most of it's suggested, and, and, and not shown. The torture is done by machines. This humanoid is hung up in the air, and during this, she has a kind of memory or flashback to a time in which she was in her own world in this natural surroundings of great beauty. There's no explanation as to why the character is in this situation, but I suspect it may have been some sort of invasion of their world. World, she was captured and is being used to experiment on by whatever organization that caught them. That's a familiar science fiction trope. So naturally, think about that. What makes this film particularly interesting is its po, its subject, and its poetic treatment of it. There's a, there's a distinct sadness. The emphasis is not on the horror, although it's quite horrific, and it has a, an unusual quality of mood, an elegiac mood that you don't often see in machinima, because it takes a bit of an imagination and some experience to be able to do this. The fact that he was able to put this together, I assume, as a young man, it was quite remarkable. I came across the film in the archive.org collection, and it was immediate. I remember seeing it when it came out, and I was immediately taken by it, because I don't know how many times I have to say this archive.org is not curated anymore, so people upload tons of shit to it and tons of mediocrity, so wading through all of that mediocrity to get to a gem like this is a real treat, and I hope you guys find it as interesting as I did.

Damien Valentine 16:27
I found it, it's a very disturbing film, which is meant to be, and I do like that you don't really get any explanation of who she is, why she's there. It's all left up to your imagination. You never get any clue as to who's operating those machinery or anything like that, and that flash of the memory of the natural environment, and she's always.. I didn't know, I couldn't really tell if that was a memory or just her imagination just trying to picture something that's an escape from what she's going through, right there, and it

Ricky Grove 17:05
could be either one.

Damien Valentine 17:06
Yeah, and I think that's part of the one of the strengths of the film is it lets you, when you watch it, it's up to you to decide how you interpret it. One of the things I was thinking about this one is how it was made, and so I did read the description, which I won't read it again, Ricky, because you just read that, and I was thinking, well, you know, someone can make this now with iClone, and it'd be fairly easy to do, like the actual animation, and so on, but when you think back to 2004 when this was released, an incredible amount of work would have had to go into making this because you have to build the environment and the character because she's not a character model that I recognize for any game, so he obviously had to make her or had someone do it for him, and then have her suspended up in the in the set and she does move like not very much, but she's, she's not just a static model who doesn't do anything at all. She does wobble this little bit, and you've got the machinery that's also moving as it does its things to her. And then there's that shot of the tear that comes down, and you know when you've got a tool that's very, very limited, like this one that made this one, because he actually kind of hints that this is a very basic tool he had access to, to be able to pull that off is an incredible amount of work that I don't think people really think about anymore when they're making machinima, I mean, if you're using iClone or Unreal, then you've got all those tools there for you, or if you're making something in a game, you're kind of limited by what the game has, but games are so much more capable now than what they were back when this was made. So, I think this is one of those things where the effort that goes into making machinima back then is kind of forgotten about, and this was a nice reminder that you know it's a short film, but it probably took a very long time to make, just because of that extra detail.

Phil Rice 19:10
Yes, yeah, there's some real handcrafted feel to this, to that for the character, and and the contraption that she's trapped in, and that world that she goes visits in her mind. Yeah, it doesn't look like it's borrowed from anywhere. It looks very handcrafted, and that gives it a really unique look and feel. I knew I was, I knew I was in for something special when I heard a very specific sample being used in the soundtrack right at the beginning of the film, almost before the opening crawl was, or the opening kind of credity sequence was done from it's a sample from nine and. Snails, the downward spiral, which, if you want, you know, if you want a feeling of horrific sadness, yeah, that's where you go, right? It's just, and then later, the music that's used in the closing credits of the film, those are all from remix albums that were spawned from Nine Inch Nails to Downward Spiral, which is clearly a source of inspiration for the vibe of this film. There was a, there was a music video made for one of the songs of Nine Inch Nails prior EP. The song was happiness and slavery. It's kind of the one that really put them on the map in terms of public awareness. Well, they made a music video for that, which never made it to MTV, because it was far, far too graphic, and the subject of it is a man who is being tortured by, and eventually consumed by a machine, and it is - it's unbelievably graphic, and it's, it's not animated footage, it's like it's using a live action, some, some, obviously, some, some trickery there too. They didn't actually have a machine murder a person, but it's, it's awful, and it was only available as kind of what we would now call the dark web, right? That's not what it was, but it was only distributed on VHS, and was kind of hard to find, but it's very, very difficult to watch, and there's some clear inspiration in in this film from that, and then the look of the the female, the character, it evokes a vibe of the look of Marilyn Manson, which was a band that toured a lot with Nine Inch Nails, and he kind of had that when he would don his full makeup, it was this ghostly pallor, and you know, in their videos, a lot of otherworldly long limbs, and just these, this very eerie feel. If you're looking for a modern example of the kind of the vibe of this, there was a series that was on it, was either on Showtime or HBO several years ago, it was a Ridley Scott produced film that I don't know, or series called Raised with Wolves, and it's a sci-fi horror.

Ricky Grove 22:30
Oh yeah, see them,

Phil Rice 22:32
yeah, and some of the look of the android character in that, which is a female, is very, of course that came after this, but it's if you're looking, if you're wondering what's the vibe of this film, obviously the best way to find out is go go watch it, but it is a hard watch, it's disturbing, and I do love how much is not explained. I think that's essential for this. I think it would be less of a film if we came away from it knowing all sorts of particulars about why she's been taken and how and why someone's doing this to her. Now, you don't, not only do you not need those, it would actually reduce the film to know them. It's, it's, it's much better where it's just allowed to breathe like this, so I'll put wonderfully done film. The, you know, the audio fidelity is what you'd expect from a film from this era. If it were done today, it would, it wouldn't have, it would be higher resolution audio or higher fidelity audio, but the work that's going on in the audio, the mix of there's really, it's hard sometimes to tell to draw the line between what's score and what's sound effects and ambience, especially during the torture scenes, it's all functioning as one whole to create this feeling that to me, that's when score is the most interesting, not when it's just background music, you know. So, yeah, the amazing work that I had, I had never heard of, and I doubt that I ever would have if you hadn't found this in the archive, Ricky. So,

Phil Rice 24:18
I'll be, I'll be looking at Julian's subsequent work, to see, you know, what else he's done. I don't, I, I kind of doubt it's in this vein, but you know, yeah, no, it's, it's, I thought he was, I

Ricky Grove 24:31
think you're absolutely right, he was so smart to lessen the impact of the torture by not having real time sound effects of the effects of torture on the body. He let the score handle most of that, which I thought was very smart. And then also he was very discreet in terms of the camera angles that he used to show he would show the threatening. Possibility, and then cut away to something else, so you don't know whether it acts like a saw. Did the saw actually cut the person or not, which I think was a great way to keep the horror at a manageable, somewhat manageable, and less overt style, you know, another filmmaker might, maybe one of your TikTok filmmakers might have decided to go full hog and show all of the limbs being cut and head snapping and cracks and bones and all of that shit, but that none of that is in this, which gives it such a sensibility of an artistic sensibility that makes you feel in good hands. The only thing that disappointed me was the fact that we don't have a really well-rendered copy of

Speaker 1 25:54
it. Yeah, it's

Ricky Grove 25:54
very soft. Some folks, I think, might dismiss it because of that quality, but don't stay with it. It's really worth watching.

Damien Valentine 26:06
I found the low quality of the video and the low quality of the sound actually added to the horror of it. It's just, it's, it's pretty hard to just know to be described. It's just like the sound, because it's not perfect audio, it's, it's very rough and low quality. It feels like it's very raw rather than carefully mixed, which, you know, given the nature of this film, makes it more uncomfortable to watch, but not because it's bad, but because it's, it matches the tones. Yeah,

Phil Rice 26:42
I agree, yeah, it kind of lends to a, it's not really a found footage feel that it gives, but an archival footage, yeah, like this is something that happened long ago and has just now come to light, and yeah, you wouldn't have a perfectly rendered thing there, yeah, I agree, it's a good.. I really agree on the restraint, Ricky. I think that there's a.. there's a brand of modern horror that misses the point in that way, that thinks that the point of horror is the chainsaw, you know, the actual wearing of flesh, you know, and that it's always been there.

Damien Valentine 27:22
Yeah, the

Ricky Grove 27:22
Grand You know theater back in the 30s used to have live stage events, and what they would do effects of disembowelings and eye gougings and all of that stuff, and that that vein of horror has always, I mean, it's still present today. Going to the Horror Writers Association. There are still people that write that in vain, that vein, and it is popular with a certain segment of readers, but the great majority of authors tend to sniff at that restraint, and suggestion is always a better option, I think. Mood

Damien Valentine 28:02
hearth film. We all, I know, we all enjoy the original alien film, has very little blood in it. It's got that, it's perfect horror. But apart from the famous chest bursting scene, which obviously that needs blood, there's no, there's no blood anywhere else in the film, even when they've been battered around a bit, you know, there's no arms being ripped off or anything like that. Well,

Ricky Grove 28:24
they do it by sound, as I recall. The captain is lost, and you hear the scream echoing in the background, gurgling

Phil Rice 28:32
almost.

Ricky Grove 28:32
Yeah,

Damien Valentine 28:33
but you don't see anything that happens to him, like, and even when they go to find what happened to him? They go in the vent, they said, like, there's no blood, no nothing. So, even he's there was actually no blood left behind. They don't show it to us, but the up and the other characters are saying there is, there's nothing there, no trace of him at all. And

Ricky Grove 28:53
films, the great horror films are always suggestive.

Damien Valentine 28:58
Yeah,

Ricky Grove 28:59
you know, Haunting of Hill House, you never see what's outside that moves that door back and forth, and that's what's terrifying. Alien Planet of Vampires, fantastic horror sci-fi, in which everything is almost everything is suggested. It's about mood, it's about a sensibility, and I think this Julian Van Hoeniger captured that very well in this film. Yeah, sounds like he

Phil Rice 29:27
really gets that.

Damien Valentine 29:28
Yeah,

Phil Rice 29:30
well, great pick, Ricky. Audience, what did you think? We'd love to hear what you think of this film. I'll bet it's one of, you know, you probably, if you tune into this show, you encounter stuff you've never seen before, but I'll bet there's nobody out there listening who has ever seen this before. So, we'd love to hear what you think of it. So, drop us a comment wherever you're watching this, or an email at talk at completely machinima.com My name is Phil Rice, and on behalf of my co. Hosts Ricky Grove and Damian Valentine, we'll see you next.